One demagogue, 25,000 followers, Islam and criminal asylum seekers as the enemy. There are undertones of racism and nationalism, no question. Not even the hypocritical 19-point position paper of PEGIDA can change that. Because it is not honest. Yet over the last 12 weeks one could watch what PEGIDA is really about: diffuse frustration with the social system, much like the Occupy movement, which died of it.
Will PEGIDA wither away in the same way? Unlike the Occupy movement, it has a demagogue at its head; it is convenient, because it is a “stroll” and not a weeks-long camp in a big city; and its regularity seems slowly to be turning into habit. So PEGIDA has quite different preconditions from Occupy.
Islam is the nail on which the anger has been hung, asylum policy the pretext, the pseudo-political issue – perhaps to stay true to the name …IDA. Yet all of this has little to do with religion or asylum. PEGIDA is the general question of the system, posed in a seemingly dim-witted way by a people that can hardly find a point of attack on a social system which, in its head, is both the problem and the solution. Respectable citizen or neo-Nazi: they all meet at the electronics store to buy the screens on which they follow the “lying press” (Lügenpresse), football matches or Das Traumschiff. All three TV formats illustrate the problem of our time:
Football is about the sport. So goes the outdated idea. Even the last of the mental acrobats should be plagued by doubt, since he must have heard about the horrendous sums and the recurring corruption scandals of FIFA. No, it is business, nothing more. Talk about Bayern Munich – even in New Zealand – and the remark comes that the club has the money to buy good players. Money: going once.
Das Traumschiff is another category. There, all is still right with the world. A world of luxury that many will only ever experience through the box. A world in which money is no object is unreal for most people: so after 88 minutes of illusion one drops back into the real drama of one’s own existence, the treadmill that spins ever faster. One could surely afford a holiday on a cruise ship, but then one has to slog away for a year or two, pull oneself together… when everything could be so simple. Money: going twice.
The “lying press”, as PEGIDA calls it, is ultimately the mirror of a world shot through with consumerism and pressure to perform, where vacuous show formats meet the news. The bought press reproduces “infomercials”, the free press reports, and patterns can be discerned in all of it: for one, that the press (and Google) filter information – on the internet too. For another, how politics goes round in circles, without result, while local councils have to close their facilities. Lobbying is by now so brazen that even private initiative is prohibited per legem. And then more than a few people (not only PEGIDA supporters) ask themselves: is this still democracy?
The redistribution of wealth becomes palpable in a world where 1,100 people together own as much wealth as all the rest [Forbes]. One hardly needs to quote Kant any more…
Envy (livor), as a propensity to perceive the well-being of others with pain, although one’s own suffers no loss by it, […], but which otherwise is called merely jealousy (invidentia), is nevertheless only an indirectly malicious disposition, namely a reluctance to see our own well-being cast into the shade by the well-being of others, because we know how to measure it not by its inner worth but only by comparison with the well-being of others, and how to make this estimate tangible.
…to get to the root of the problem. Envy cannot even grasp superlatives like these any more. But the diffuse feeling of being exploited as a small cog in the system remains. Money: sold.
That is what the middle class slogs away for: a slice of the pie. A typical PEGIDA supporter, according to TU Dresden, is male, well educated, employed. Middle class. If one then considers the balancing act of this middle class and the working conditions in Germany that make people ill (keyword: Amazon), one sees that the life of an average citizen consists of pressure to perform, worry and hope. An existence in which money is the problem and the supposed solution. Too much to rebel against, too little to be content with, and too much like a drug that cannot be blamed for one’s own misery. Frustrated citizens, then – frustrated PEGIDA supporters.
So why do foreigners, of all people, have to take the blame?
Public order, above all on the manageable patch outside a Dresden front door, is one of the last bastions of an insecure citizen. One has come to terms with the people around one – in Saxony these are mainly Germans (Saxony statistics: 2.2% foreign nationals) – and somehow cannot shake the feeling: homo homini lupus. Criminals are to be condemned in general, child molesters above all; and so the hype that drags on for days whenever a sexual offence against a minor in someone’s care turns up in the press is astonishing every time. Yet sexual offences make up a mere 0.8% of all criminal offences in Germany. A similar dynamic applies to criminal foreigners: offences committed by foreigners are more popular, and therefore weighed more heavily than the rest, 89% of which are committed by Germans, or rather Saxons.
Sadly ironic, when popularity (quantity) is equated with value (quality). Certain media are to blame for this, and the irony is heightened when PEGIDA supporters accuse those very media of lying, when, in Saxony of all places, they get their knowledge of crimes by foreigners and of African refugees from these same media.
Public order is a common denominator on which empathy converges, where people compare themselves and where criminal foreigners “come here” and “at our expense” and “integrate”… and so on. With criminals (foreigners and child molesters) there is a consensus one can chant slogans about. With foreigners and asylum seekers in general it gets a little more difficult.
And so PEGIDA supporters (like everyone else) try to draw a clear line between the criminal foreigner and the foreigner as such. Take away the criminal part and there is still the welfare scrounging. No one knows how much money an asylum-seeker family gets per week – it’ll be enough, surely. The more one questions, the more the picture of the concerned citizen blurs into that of the anti-Semite. Asylum seekers are basically welcome if their suffering can be duly proven.
And yet: xenophobia is not PEGIDA’s main motivation. It seems rather to be the fear of anything that could make the little that remains of an intact world fall apart. It is all those diffuse little fears and the awareness that the pressure to perform in a growth society exceeds the citizens’ strength. Unfortunately, the PEGIDA founder Lutz Bachmann churns out hollow demagogic phrases that reflect the backward world view of oafish stay-at-homes and stir up fear of the bogeyman.
Surely their goals will be formulated over time – and the more precise they become, the more problems of identification this will create for supporters. Then the hangers-on will part ways with the true believers in the programme. One can only hope that either PEGIDA’s programme then becomes cosmopolitan and realistic, or its circle of supporters vanishingly small.
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